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Short abstract:

Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing industry, anchored by TSMC, produces 90% of the world's high end chips, and has been dubbed by former president Tsai Ing-Wen "Taiwan's Silicon Shield." This paper explores the geopolitics of semiconductors through the geophysics of Taiwan's seismically active and now drought-prone landscape.

Long abstract:

Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing industry, anchored by TSMC, produces 90% of the world's high end chips, and has been dubbed by former president Tsai Ing-Wen "Taiwan's Silicon Shield." This paper explores the geopolitics of semiconductors through the geophysics of Taiwan's seismically active and now drought-prone landscape. It proposes that, in addition to exploring the geology and politics of supply chains for rare earths and semiconductor materials, that the geopolitics of the Taiwan Strait status quo, if Tsai is to be taken seriously, is grounded in longer histories of seismic, hydrological, and change, grounded in the East Asian developmental state as, effectively, a spot-terraforming power. In developing a mode of landscape ethnography that thinks special economic zones that produce the semiconductors that underlie technological modernity - now explicitly redeployed as a war over the hardware that, for now, grants US allies a technological edge - as a different kind of shield: like a shield volcano: a tectonic formation grounded in landscape processes that are deeply tied with specific networks of policy anxiety, the memory of earthquake disasters, the increasingly minute, atom-level scales, at play in semiconductor manufacturing, all of which imply seismic action into the very manufacturing processes that amplify and also hold off aggression across the Taiwan Strait. Landscape ethnography, I argue, helps to reroute political science and logistics-supply chain accounts of geopolitical tension by insetting those into practices of managing geophysical pressure.